It’s not that there aren’t cruel or selfish people in his stories. In the world of Tomie dePaola, one follows the advice given by legendary football coach Lou Holtz: Root for everybody! Yet we still rejoice when the beautiful visiting art teacher allows Tommy an extra piece of paper to do his own picture with his own 64-color Crayola box. Anyone who has dealt with school-age children knows that after one exception, le deluge. One sympathizes with the teacher in The Art Lesson who tells the 5-year-old Tommy that he can only have one piece of paper, use only the 8-color school box of crayons, and draw the Pilgrim man and woman along with the sacrificial turkey. The biennial Children’s Literature Legacy award committee, which honored him for his lifetime achievements in 2011, commented on his “innate understanding of childhood, a distinctive visual style, and a remarkable ability to adapt his voice to perfectly suit the story.” What marks him out ultimately as a conservative of the imaginative variety is that this understanding of childhood includes not only the child-protagonist’s sense of self, but also the sense of self of the other children and indeed the adults in the stories. One of the things many notices of his death on March 30 included was a recognition of his unique ability to remember what it was like to be a child and communicate that. My favorites are The Art Lesson (1989), Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs (1973), and Tom (1993). While he was perhaps most famous for his Caldecott-winning Strega Nona (1976), he also told much of his own childhood story in a number of illustrated memoirs and also a number of individual stories telling some part of his childhood. I also knew about his brother Joe, his sisters Judie and Maureen, his Italian grandmother Nana Fall-River, his Irish-American grandparents Tom and Nana, his twin cousins who were artists, his love of popcorn and pets, and a whole raft of other facts. I don’t think I knew that, but I certainly knew about his parents, Joseph and Florence. The author and illustrator of more than 270 books, Thomas Anthony “Tomie” dePaola was born in Meriden, Connecticut on September 15, 1934. Lewis, “is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” By this judgment, all of the late Tomie dePaola’s books are very good children’s stories. “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children,” wrote C.S. What marks him out ultimately as a conservative of the imaginative variety is that his understanding of childhood includes not only the child-protagonist’s sense of self, but also the sense of self of the other children and indeed the adults in the stories. Tomie dePaola understood that life is difficult and yet redemption is possible.
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